Shadows Of Doubt Cast Executions In Different Light

March 28, 1995|By Eric Zorn.

The comfort zone surrounding the death penalty in Illinois is about to get smaller.

In each of the three non-volunteer executions in the state since the resumption of capital punishment-John Gacy last year and James Free and Hernando Williams last week-there was no doubt among sane individuals that the condemned had committed vicious murders. Such certainty created an emotional buffer that insulated those with perhaps mixed feelings about capital punishment from the natural, moral aversion to strapping down a human being and killing him.

But not all executions will be as easy to shrug off. Sooner or later-sooner, as it turns out, in Illinois-one of those messy cases will come along. A case in which troubling questions hang over the prosecution and in which the condemned's protestations of innocence ring at least just plausibly enough to make us wonder whether an irrevocable execution is really the right and necessary step.

Such a case is the story of Girvies Davis, 37, the next in line to be executed in Illinois. You've seen and heard very little about him locally because the crime for which he is scheduled to be killed May 17 occurred in Downstate Belleville, near St. Louis, in 1978.

Is he an innocent man? No. He has long acknowledged-and acknowledged again in a phone interview from Death Row over the weekend-his participation in two armed robberies in which victims were slain. He denies being the actual killer (a survivor in one of the robberies did not pick him out of a lineup as the shooter) but has accepted-and been sentenced to extended prison terms for-his accountability in those crimes.

Davis was a hard, bad man who led a hard, bad life. He was one of eight children who grew up in poverty in East St. Louis-"a poor pathetic boy who just sat there and said nothing," according to his 4th grade teacher, Annie Quinley Petchulat, the last teacher he had before he tumbled into the juvenile justice system.

He was a purse snatcher, he said, a petty thief, a burglar, an alcoholic and a re-seller of stolen goods. He was 21 when, in August 1979, he and one or more accomplices held up an East St. Louis auto parts store. In the resulting shootout with the owner, a clerk was killed and Davis was wounded. He was later arrested at a hospital.

Police said that 10 days later, Davis called investigators to his jail cell very late one night and gave them a handwritten list of crimes he said he had participated in. Police took him out of his cell, drove him around town looking for "evidence," and eventually came away with a series of written confessions that cleared the books on several murders. The confessions were written by police, and signed by Davis at around 4 a.m.

A problem with this account is that Davis was illiterate. He couldn't read and couldn't write anything other than his name, according to Richard Cosey, his longtime juvenile parole officer. Another problem is that some of the crimes on the list he allegedly wrote were later proven to have been committed by others. And still another is that the middle-of-the-night timing of the confessions tends to lend credence to Davis' claim that he was taken by surprise from his cell and coerced into confessing to, among other crimes, the then unsolved home invasion and slaying of 89-year-old Charles Biebel. It is for this crime alone that he is sentenced to die.

Davis said that police took him out of the squad car, removed his shackles and told him he could either sign the confessions or try to escape-implying, he said, that they would kill him as he ran. These confessions, which Davis says were false, comprise virtually the entire case against him in the Biebel murder and one other murder for which he remains unsentenced and also denies responsibility.

Desperate and phony excuses? Could well be. A jury (from which prosecutors excluded all blacks) found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, after all, and sentenced him to die (thought only after prosecutors told them their sentencing decision was advisory only).

But still, there isn't enough proof that Girvies Davis himself murdered anyone or intended that anyone be murdered to allow a fair and cautious person to push the plunger that will end his life.

At the very least, shouldn't we at least insist that tales of execution conclude with an exclamation point, not a question mark?